The Clockmaker's Secret

by Jack Benton

  ‘But there was no suspicion of her?’

  ‘Of course there was. We considered that she and the boyfriend were in on it together, but again, no motive, no evidence. Had they knocked off the mother, it would have been different. We could tell there was plenty of friction there, but between the dad and the girl … by all accounts, they were close. Like, he was the last person she would have knocked off. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, of course not. But ninety-nine times out of a hundred? No way.’

  ‘And the boyfriend was cleared? I heard he was a suspect.’

  ‘Mostly because he lied. He told us he was at home that night. She told us he was waiting outside. Either way, once he’d broken down and confessed to getting scared, we had nothing on him. No motive, no evidence.’

  The Alsatian looked up and gave a soft bark, as though to confirm what the old policeman claimed.

  ‘I heard a rumour Celia had a child,’ Slim said tentatively, not sure how much he ought to reveal. ‘And that Amos Birch took the child when he left.’

  ‘A lot of rumours surrounded that family,’ Cassell said. ‘I heard nothing about a child during the investigation. It was for a single missing person, not two. If it were, it would be something to consider.’

  ‘If I had proof, would it make a difference?’ Slim asked, thinking of the videos and their grainy images of Amos Birch carrying Charlotte in his arms. He had sent one to Kay for analysis, but the others were hidden under his mattress. Celia had asked for her keepsakes back, but Slim had so far managed to stall her.

  ‘I’m long retired, but I have colleagues in the force who were young when that case happened. They’d be interested, I’m sure. Like I said, there was no evidence of a child. None registered to the address, and no sign one had ever lived there. We conducted a search of the house during the investigation, but aside from a whole lot of junk … nothing.’

  ‘So there was nothing suspicious at all?’

  Cassell leaned forward. ‘To me, only the delay.’

  ‘What delay?’

  ‘Birch was gone nearly two full days before his disappearance was reported. The mother explained it away as saying he did that sometimes, wandered off to be alone. No proof, so of course we did a forensics sweep, seeing as they’d have had time to clean up. But a crazy teenager and a woman in a wheelchair? They’d have left something. Nope, not a thing. And Celia and her boyfriend hadn’t even aligned their stories. We had nothing to go on. Only the shoe prints mud on the path down toward the moor, a man walking away.’

  ‘And no one local saw anything?’

  ‘We interviewed, of course. Birch was an enigmatic but well-liked man. Not well-known on a personal level, it seemed, although he had a few customers in the area for whom he fixed old clocks from time to time. One or two were quite upset to hear of his disappearance, but no one had seen him.’

  Slim took a sip of his beer, aware there were now three empty glasses beside him to Cassell’s two.

  ‘So you think it was an open and shut case? Nothing to suggest foul play at all?’

  Cassell leaned forward, then slowly rose to his feet, as though it took much effort. ‘I’ll leave you my number, if this miraculous new evidence comes to light, but I know what you want. You TV people are all the same. You’re fishing for a mystery that just isn’t there. More than five hundred people go missing each year in Devon and Cornwall alone. Most of them are never heard of again. Were they all murdered? Some, for sure. But most?’ He shook his head. ‘I’ll bid you good evening, sir.’

  Slim stood up to watch him leave, the dog padding quietly at Cassell’s side. Then he sat down and took a long swig of his beer, sighing as he did so.

  Another nothing lead. He ought to go back to his hostel, make some notes, get some rest, but he was already drunk.

  Might as well have another beer.

  35

  Mrs. Greyson looked like a storm had come clattering through and left its impression on her face.

  ‘I don’t appreciate my guesthouse being used as a drop-in centre,’ she snapped. ‘If you have cause to just come and go as you please then I suggest you find somewhere else for the remainder of your stay.’

  ‘I called you … I left you a message.’

  ‘No, Mr. Hardy, you didn’t call me.’ A stern finger pointed at the phone on the table in the hall. ‘Do you see a flashing light? No, neither do I. No messages. Had you not been a full grown man I might have called the police.’

  Slim frowned, trying to order his thoughts through a blistering hangover. He was sure he had called her. He fumbled with his phone in his pocket, determined to check, but succeeded only in dropping it on the doormat, among a handful of letters addressed to Mrs. Greyson. He scrambled for it, but his hands were shaking. He was yet to have a drink since passing out last night and waking up by some miracle in the hostel room he had rented. Another nine hours of resistance, another futile sand fort which would eventually, inevitably be breached and overrun by the relentless tide.

  By the time his uncooperative fingers had opened the recent calls log to discover he had inadvertently left a voicemail on a number which missed by three digits the large print, highlighted number pinned to the wall above the guesthouse’s phone, Mrs. Greyson had swooped under him to rescue her post from the muddy dangers of his stumbling feet.

  ‘What’s going on with you, Mr. Hardy?’ Mrs. Greyson said, stepping back with her letters clutched tightly against her chest.

  For the first time, Slim detected a hint of sympathy. ‘I’m caught up in a nasty web and I can’t get out,’ Slim said, shoving his hands into his pockets to hide the shaking, even though Mrs. Greyson had already seen. ‘I’m doing everything I can, but every time I think I’ve escaped, I get caught up again.’

  Mrs. Greyson sighed. ‘Sometimes it’s not possible to escape,’ she said, looking down at her feet. ‘Sometimes you have to learn to live with your captivity.’ Then, offering a rare smile, she added, ‘Would a coffee help? I know how to make the kind that might.’

  Slim nodded. ‘Thanks. If it’s not too much trouble.’

  Mrs. Greyson lifted an eyebrow. ‘Is there anything that isn’t trouble about you, Mr. Hardy?’

  Slim could only shrug. He opened his mouth to respond, then closed it again and shook his head.

  ‘Well, I’ve cleared up the breakfast things,’ Mrs. Greyson said, ‘but it’s a nice enough day, so if you’d like to sit on the back veranda…?’

  ‘Sure.’

  She led him through the dining room with its empty tables and out of a pair of patio doors onto a rear deck overlooking a neat garden. Tidy flowerbeds lined a lawn leading down a gentle slope to a cluster of trees, backing on to a hedge that separated the garden from the adjacent farmland. Slim waited while Mrs. Greyson went back inside, then returned with two coffees in petite china cups. A sip of the scalding liquid confirmed she had laced it with brandy.

  ‘I’m afraid there isn’t much colour in the garden at this time of year,’ she said. ‘We’re a week or two away from the daffodils. They always seem to come later here than you see on the BBC Weather reports. It’s like Penleven has been forgotten in more ways than one.’

  ‘It’s pretty,’ Slim said. ‘It must be hard to maintain. You must be busy, looking after the guesthouse as well.’

  ‘I’ve always been used to it,’ she said. ‘Even before my husband passed.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. How long has it been?’

  ‘Not long enough,’ Mrs. Greyson said with sudden vehemence. ‘My Roy … he had one face for the outside, and one for the in.’

  Slim said nothing. He stared at the line of trees, his coffee cup held protectively in his hands. The brandy was already doing its job, calming his nerves, slowing his heart. In the place of its fading apprehension came a slowly creeping guilt that yet again he had failed.

  ‘He drove a lorry,’ Mrs. Greyson said, her gaze far away, lost in the fields. ‘He’d be away a few days at a time, sometimes a we
ek or more. When he was at home … I needed to self-medicate from time to time. So I know how it feels. You know, what you’re dealing with. More than just time to time, I’d say. More like all the time.’

  Slim closed his eyes. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. I got used to it over the years. It’s funny how things change, isn’t it? I can still remember our wedding day, and the years afterward when we were happy. Later events might have soiled the memories somewhat, but I still knew genuine happiness. For a time. But we shouldn’t be greedy, should we?’

  She lifted her coffee and took a sip. A wince and a smile told Slim that Mrs. Greyson had added a little self-medication to her own, too.

  ‘I guess not,’ Slim said. ‘When did he, um, pass?’

  ‘August the second, 1998,’ Mrs. Greyson said. ‘He rolled his lorry on the M4 in thick fog. I’ll never forget the phone call from the police. I had put on my guesthouse voice as you do, terrified it was Roy to say he’d be home early. But it was the police to tell me he’d been trapped inside the cab. The engine had ignited, and….’

  Slim nodded. ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘At the funeral I cried in all the right places. It was easy to fake; I simply thought of the good days, and I guess I did shed a tear over the man he had once been. I was an expert at it by then. You learn how to smile in the right places when you live with a monster. And running the guesthouse … Roy was a coward. He could never look at my eyes, but there were days when my back was so bruised I could barely lift the breakfast trays.’

  Slim shook away a tear. He finished the coffee and sat up. ‘If there’s any way I can help you—’

  Mrs. Greyson gave a dry chuckle. ‘I appreciate the thought, Mr. Hardy, but I’m quite all right these days. My garden doesn’t take much weeding, and as you’ve probably noticed, the guesthouse is hardly booked up flat. But if there’s any time I can be of help to you … you’ll find the hard stuff in the cabinet under that wobbly old clock. Don’t drink it all, but if you need something to calm your nerves, no need to ask.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I’ll add a couple of pounds on to your daily rate to cover it.’ She gave an awkward wink. ‘That’s a joke. I don’t make all that many, so perhaps it surprised you.’

  Mrs. Greyson cleared up, and Slim headed up to his room. After taking a shower to wash off the previous day’s soils, he pulled the clock out from under his bed and unwrapped it.

  ‘What aren’t you telling me?’ he whispered, wondering if his question was addressed to the clock, or elsewhere, to the ears of someone harbouring secrets.

  36

  The little village store carried ample stocks to keep Slim roadworthy. With a 250ml bottle of Teacher’s tucked into the inner pocket of his jacket, he headed with renewed purpose to Worth Farm, the bolt cutters wrapped in a towel in his bag. With a little lubrication he had rediscovered his edge, the spark that would set the bonfire alight. He needed to get under the skin of the mystery, break the seal that was keeping him out.

  The sun had dipped beneath the horizon, and the tors of Bodmin Moor were stretching long fingers across the land when he reached the top of the farm lane.

  Taking the footpath through the adjacent field, he waited until he had reached the lower corner of the farmyard’s grounds then climbed up into the hedge, wincing as thorns pierced his jacket, scraping the skin beneath. The climb had looked easy from the field—a bank of grass topped with a few sparse bushes through which ample gaps appeared—but the branches were lower than they looked, and the grassy bank more slippery. By the time he scrambled out the other side, his clothes were soaked and muddy, and he was bleeding from a dozen scratches.

  The farmyard stood still. Late February was welcoming the warmth of March so animals were likely still out at pasture, such as there was this close to Bodmin Moor. Lights flickered in a lower window of the farmhouse on the other side of the yard, but the yard itself was silent.

  He approached the shed from the side, keeping to the hedgerow, the bolt cutters slung over his shoulder. Light from the farmhouse glinted off the metal runners on the door. Slim trod through the damp grass alongside, running his fingers over the old stone walls, mind reeling with what he might find inside. When he reached the front path, he squatted low then felt for the padlock.

  The chain was thinner than the padlock deserved, fitting easily into the bolt cutters’ jaws. With the instrument poised, Slim paused. There was no way he could fix the chain once it was broken. He could disguise it, but the next time someone came to open the shed, they would see.

  Slim pulled the bottle from his pocket and took a long swallow.

  ‘Where are you, Amos?’ he muttered, lifting the bolt cutters once more.

  A growl came out of the dark, followed by a flurry of barking so close Slim felt an acute sense of panic unlike any he had felt since his days in Iraq. He froze, unable to move as something rushed at him, jaws snapping. He got the bolt cutters up just quick enough to save his face, knocking the animal aside. It went instead for his ankle, but he managed to get to his feet and stumble back as its teeth broke his skin.

  An outside light came on. The farmhouse door opened and a man’s voice shouted, ‘Tom? What you got out there? Rat?’

  Torchlight flashed across Slim’s face as he struggled back toward the hedge. The man’s confusion turned to outrage, a flurry of obscenities followed by something long and shiny lifting against his shoulder.

  The dog let go, snarled, then came back for another try, but Slim took his chance to dive into the hedgerow. The dog, some kind of terrier, kept its distance, its feet pattering in circles as the relentless barrage of barking echoed in Slim’s ears. Over the noise, Slim heard a woman shout, ‘No, Trevor!’ then the roar of a shotgun blast filled the air. The branches rustled, the dog squealed and fled, and a man’s gruff voice shouted, ‘I’ll gut you if I catch you!’

  As torchlight flickered in the branches above, Slim tried to slip down the other side of the fence into the field, but met a cluster of thick branches which held him in place. Instead, he wriggled deeper into the thicket, out of sight unless someone climbed up into the hedge to look.

  ‘Did you see him?’ the woman said, her voice close to the hedgerow now. Slim recognised Maggie Tinton’s voice.

  ‘He went over there. Tom took a chunk out of the bugger. Might be bleeding out.’

  In a different situation, Slim would have laughed. The dog had taken a good bite of him, but a proper guard dog would have taken off half his leg.

  ‘Did you see what he was up to?’

  ‘Trying to get into the shed, looked like. Must have been after my bike.’

  ‘No one would want that old thing. I don’t even know why you bother with a lock.’

  ‘If your father had—’

  ‘Oh, quit it, Trevor. I bet it was one of those treasure hunter fools. That was Amos Birch’s shed after all. I wish the blessed police would just find him and put us all to peace.’

  Trevor thrust the shotgun into the hedge barely an arm’’ length from where Slim was crammed in between two thickets of brambles.

  ‘I’ll have a look around the perimeter, see if we can see where the sod got in. He might have dropped something. You give the police a call. Tom, come here!’

  ‘I’m sick of this,’ Maggie said. ‘They just keep coming back. We get a few months of quiet and then some hooligan starts poking around, refusing to take no for an answer. I don’t care how cheap it was. It wasn’t worth it.’

  ‘Don’t go blaming me,’ Trevor said. ‘You wanted the whole lady-of-the-manor life. We had to take what we could get.’

  ‘Well perhaps we should sell up.’ They had moved away from the hedgerow now. ‘I’ve never got used to this place. All that business with the Birch family … it leaves a sour taste.’

  ‘Oh, stop whining and go call the police.’

  ‘If there’s no constable here within ten minutes I shall write to the council. They’ll be after you for firi
ng that gun, you can be sure, but our safety—’

  They rounded a building at the far side of the farmyard. The instant they were out of sight Slim was moving, squeezing through the knot of brambles, shimmying down the hedge and running through the field to the lane and his bike.

  Pedaling hard, he was halfway back to the guesthouse when a police car’s flickering lights appeared farther down the hill. Slim jumped off the bike and crouched out of sight, holding the bike down among the weeds as the patrol car rushed past.

  The guesthouse door had been latched. Panicking, Slim ran around the back, scaled the hedgerow into Mrs. Greyson’s back garden, and made his way up to the back of the house. As he had hoped, she had left the back door unlocked, so he went inside, quickly pulling off his dirty clothes, which he used to wrap his even dirtier shoes.

  The living room was dark and empty. He had just climbed the stairs and crept into his room when the telephone in the hall began to ring, mirrored by the muffled ringing of another phone from the room at the end of the corridor, Mrs. Greyson’s room.

  The ringing cut off. A door opened and footsteps trod along the landing. A knock came at the door.

  ‘Mr. Hardy? Are you in there?’

  Slim counted to ten before he answered, then muttered, ‘Yes, what is it?’ in the sleepiest voice he could muster.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure it’s nothing. Sorry to wake you.’

  Shuffling outside. The sound of a muffled voice. Then silence.

  Slim let out a breath he felt he had been holding since he fled Worth Farm. He switched on a lamp and surveyed the damage.

  Brambles had left his exposed skin looking like freshly painted latticework, but the dog bite was far worse, a line of puncture wounds that had oozed blood over his shoe.

  He would have to hope the police didn’t look too closely.

  37